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Student debt remains one of the few unifying themes among an increasingly diverse population. For most college graduates, student loans are a fact of life as inescapable as death or taxes — even if you declare bankruptcy, it’s a near-certainty that your student debt will remain with you.

The state of student loan debt in America is staggering. The sum of outstanding student loans throughout the nation has reached nearly $1.5 trillion in 2019, an all-time high that will almost certainly continue to top itself. The mass of student loans is piling ever higher when we look at it from an individual perspective, too: The average student debt per borrower reached an all-time high of $35,359 in 2018, according to Experian.

And the cost of attending college remains on a steady upward trend that dates back nearly 20 years. But having student loan debt doesn’t mean you can’t become a homeowner. We know this because many debt-strapped graduates do, in fact, own homes.

The homeownership rate among American millennials, the group we accurately perceive to be most burdened by outsized student debt, remains around 8 percentage points beneath where baby boomers and Gen Xers were at the same point in their lives.

However, the tides appear to be turning, with new homeowners aged 44 and younger driving a resurgence in the homebuying market. This suggests that millennials and other young people, though statistically likely to hold student debt, are becoming increasingly resourceful in finding ways to secure mortgages and become homeowners.

Most young people realize that renting is akin to throwing excess money down the drain for a temporary roof over their heads.

Contrarily, when you own an asset such as a home, the value of that asset tends to appreciate over time, even when accounting for occasional dips in the housing market. Most homeowners can eventually sell their home for a profit without doing anything more than maintaining it, and this is an understandably appealing prospect for young people, indebted or not.

Several tax advantages, the mortgage interest tax deduction among them, also increase the appeal of owning a home. Essentially, homeowners can deduct the interest they pay on their mortgage from their tax burden. Renters cannot.

Non-qualified mortgages are a major pathway for debt-laden graduates to purchase a home.

Millennials and other demographics who are likely to have substantial student debt, or a high debt-to-income ratio, are finding homeownership success in non-qualifying mortgages, also known as non-QM loans.

Non-QM loans can typically help freelancers, business owners, real estate investors and gig economy workers who can’t qualify using traditional income documentation. And non-QM loans only treat student loan debt differently on non-owner-occupied (investment/rental) properties, in which case the debt service coverage ratio (or DSCR) qualifying makes student loan debt and payments immaterial. For primary (owner-occupied) properties, student loan debt is treated following the same guidelines as the Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA).

By using the FNMA Student Loan Cash-Out Refinance, homeowners can consolidate student loans while receiving a waiver for the additional loan-level price adjuster. Essentially, they receive the same pricing as someone not taking cash on a rate and term refinance, which is much less risky.

Restrictions on lenders put in place after the last financial crisis hold the entire lending industry to a higher standard, and that includes non-QM lenders. So if you hope to obtain a non-QM loan, keep in mind that you must submit an array of information that paints a comprehensive picture of your creditworthiness. In doing so, you might be deemed eligible for a non-qualifying mortgage.

When applying for a non-QM loan it helps to consider the following:

• Is this a primary or secondary residence? If so, they’ll have the best pricing. However, if you’re looking for a non-QM loan for a rental property, this will have a loan-level price adjusters use to offset increased risk.

• Do you have someone willing to cosign? If so, this person could be a great asset to leverage because most lenders will look at the middle score of the applicant and the lowest score to qualify. Because of this, adding a cosigner will help you qualify for agency programs with prime rates, but they have no impact if you qualify individually.

• Are there debts you can afford to pay off? If so, pay down small and/or revolving debt before running your credit application because this will typically boost FICO scores.

This is one route that has created homeowners out of debt-strapped graduates. Non-QM loans have tangibly increased homeownership opportunity among graduates young and old who once thought that their debt burden precluded them from being a homeowner.